Thermaltake Frio OCK CPU Cooler Review

Today we are looking at the Frio OCK by Thermaltake – a cooler which boasts dual tower heatsinks, dual fans that can move 121 CFM of air, and 6 heatpipes to bring it all together.

That’s right, the Frio OCK is a beast, and it’s designed around the aesthetics of a Starcraft II bunker

The photo you see above is the Frio OCK installed on a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD4 motherboard – that’s not a micro-ATX board by the way, the Frio OCK is that big.

Measuring in at 143x138x158mm and weighing 2.4 pounds, this is not your “fits anywhere” heatsink. But if you are looking to take a CPU to its limits with air cooling, it may be worthy of consideration. Let’s find out!

Frio OCK – A Closer Look

We’re not going to waste a page taking pictures of the box and pasting specs… Rest assured that it comes packed safely inside a box, with foam and all that. For specs, you can go directly to Thermaltake’s site. Instead, we’ll take a closer look at the product itself, the stuff that really matters.

The heatsink is made of aluminum, and features forty-eight 0.4mm fins spaced just 1mm apart. This is an extremely dense configuration, and is assisted by six U-shaped copper heat pipes that are 6mm in diameter. It is obvious that this heatsink is intended to be used with a high CFM fan setup, which we’ll get to later.

The base is copper, to dissipate heat from the CPU better, but nickel plated for a more durable finish. The surface has a ‘machined’ look rather than the mirror finish we sometimes see on high end coolers. The plate consists of two pieces that are soldered together around the heatsinks, which probably isn’t the most efficient design heat-wise but keeps manufacturing costs down.

And now, the fan

The fan’s design is… interesting… If you were looking for a ‘classy’ aesthetic like you’d see with a Noctua cooler, you’ll have to look elsewhere. But if you want a design that shouts at the top of its lungs that you are one bad ass mofo (as if they couldn’t tell from the sound of all the fans in your rig whirring at top speed) then this is the one for you. As mentioned, it is based on a Starcraft II Terran bunker. I’m not a Starcraft player myself, but a quick Google Image Search makes it quite apparent this was the case.

Interestingly, being a universal cooler, they didn’t go all the way with either a red of blue colour scheme, but instead included both. It makes for an interesting contrast of colours, and I actually like the opaque effect. The shroud design actually makes it easy to install two fans – instead of messing around with brackets and perfect placement, you just pop it on, and it clicks into place.

As for the fans themselves, they are 130mm units that spin between 1200-2100 RPM, depending on what you have the included knob adjusted to. At low speed, they are quite audible – this is in no way a ‘silent’ cooler, no matter what you do with it. At High speed it roars, and is unsuitable for “quiet time” use. We’ll look at sound level tests later in the review.

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